Imagining rural life: Schooling as a sense of place

I present the case ofone reborn rural community populated by former urbanites. What lifestyle and values do these newcomers seek? In what ways do they locate or construct these values? In this study, a small private school provides the vehicle for adults and children to construct, communicate, and enact their idealized identities. The school provides a physical and imagined place where newcomer families negotiate their sense of rural place. The distinction between school and home values is explored as families express their identities associated with public and private lives. The school also becomes the symbolic site where the former urbanites contest their sense ofrural place with their neighbors who are long-standing rural inhabitants. The predominantly upper middle class newcomers negotiate their sense of rural place against the backdrop ofthe primarily working class old timers ' concept ofrurality. Former urbanites ' conception ofrural community emerges as imagined and situational. In American and British education literature, "rural" designates an isolated region, often the now-fragmented remnants of a once flourishing farming community. Rural areas are characterized by low socioeconomic status (SES), disconnected from metropolitan areas and low in popula-tion density. Families have often lived in rural areas for several generations; newer families moving in are uncom-mon. Research of the 1980s and 1990s tells us that mem-bers of rural communities frequently express concern for the continuation of their lifestyle, which is threatened not only by out-migration of young people to metropolitan ar-eas, but also by declining economic opportunities and clo-sure of local schools through consolidation (Bell &amp